Though she died frightfully young—at just 53—in the late 1970s, Maria Callas has never really gone away: In the last three years alone, she’s inspired both a work of performance art by Marina Abramovic and two collections by Erdem. (“She wasn’t a delicate soprano—she was a force with a raw, powerful, extraordinary voice,” the designer noted admiringly during a preview of pre-fall 2024.) And now, as we hurtle toward the 101st anniversary of her birth this December, La Divina is in the spotlight once again—this time, as a new film about her life, Maria, makes its rounds on the festival circuit. Directed by Pablo Larraín (Jackie, Spencer) and starring a never-better Angelina Jolie, the drama, which screened during the New York Film Festival this week after premiering in Venice in August, dramatizes Callas’s final days in Paris, where, after largely withdrawing from public life in the mid-1960s, she succumbed to a heart attack in 1977. (The film will be released in select theaters in late November before streaming on Netflix from December 11.)
Frankly, this treatment feels long overdue: Callas’s personal history—from her troubled childhood in Manhattan and Athens to her public feuds and anguished love affairs—was as violently dramatic as any of the roles she performed at the Met or at Covent Garden. But as a short feature from Vogue’s May 1964 issue elegantly underscores, it was Callas’s great gift to infuse her art with the stuff of her life: She was, La Scala’s Antonio Ghiringhelli pronounced, “One of the greatest and most complete personalities of the theatre in all time.” Long may she reign. |
